'While between 1895 and 1945 the German debate over how to be modern resulted in a global killing-field, a group of artists in Worpswede set down their visions for a 20th century of artistic sensibility and material living'

'Perhaps tying works of art to their originating topography is vulgar and needs to be kept discreet. But history needs Nabokov. During the artistically formative years, he lived here in the 1920s and 1930s, he peerlessly described how Berlin's 300,000 Russian émigrés endured life after the Bolshevik Revolution.'

For more than 50 years Martin Heidegger worked up in the mountain resort of Todtnauberg, at a simple desk looking east. It is not surprising that the philosopher chose to dwell in a world that has changed very little since his day.

‘The post-1989 temptation in Prague has been two-fold. The first has been to legislate the totalitarian past out of existence, the second has been to copy the liberal West blindly at a lag of 20 years’

Lesley Chamberlain writes fiction and histories of ideas. Her novel Anyone's Game was published in 2012, and A Shoe Story: Van Gogh, The Philosophers and the West will be published by Harbour Books this year.